


Five Year Gap

by theoncomingwolf



Series: Carol Lives on Earth with M&M AND is a Space Superhero [1]
Category: Avengers: Endgame - Fandom, Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Carol and Maria are married & Monica is their daughter, Carol did NOT fuck off for 25 years she lives there, F/F, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 08:47:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18688105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoncomingwolf/pseuds/theoncomingwolf
Summary: Carol comes home to an empty house.An Avengers: Endgame fic about the Danvers-Rambeau family.





	Five Year Gap

**Author's Note:**

> Major spoilers for Avengers: Engame within. This fic is meant to be overall happy.

The house is empty.

 

Realistically, Carol knew what she would find before she got there, but a traitorous part of her clung to some hope that they were alive, enough that each new piece of evidence suggesting otherwise hurts the same all over again.

 

She had her fingers tight around the throat of a scumbag murderous warlord when it happened; he fell to ash in her hands, the wind pushing his remains toward her as she scrambled away in shock. All around her, all around everyone, the same.

 

Her pager went off.

 

Her comms went off.

 

Distress signals blared from every planet within range, and she wasn’t so naive as to think the situation Fury was alerting her to was unrelated.

 

That was the first time she felt her heart drop into her stomach.

 

When Maria didn’t answer her phone, it was the second; when Monica didn’t, the third; she rang until she went straight to voicemail a dozen times each.

 

Carol knew what she was going to find by the time her feet indelicately hit Louisiana soil. Her home, empty. Maria’s phone, dead, abandoned on the corner of their bed, where she often threw it and forgot about it.

 

The bed is made, as always, but Carol’s side looks a little neater than Maria's, untouched as it has been for the past month.

 

She weakly calls out for Goose as she trips and stumbles her way down the stairs. Her steps are louder than the call, and she doesn’t pause to look. Goose would have come to her immediately if she’d stayed in the abandoned house, and as mean and trivial as she knows it is Carol isn’t really sure if she’d be relieved deep down to find the damn cat survived and not her wife.

 

In the coming months, she finds herself judging each adult she speaks to, weighing if they deserved to live over those she loved who did not. No-one passes.

 

\---

 

Monica’s apartment is empty too.

 

She forgot her fucking key at home, but after 30 seconds, her worried knocking puts her fist through the door anyway.

 

Monica’s phone is nowhere to be found, which brings a painful spark of hope to Carol’s frantic thoughts. She touches everything sitting out in the apartment, opens the fridge five times, reads through Monica’s calendar, looks for anything that might tell her if her stepdaughter had been there in the past few days.

 

After a while Carol sits, exhausted, on the edge of Monica’s bed. If she waits, Monica might come back on her own.

 

\---

 

When Carol wakes up, the first sleep she’s had in a week, she is alone.

The door is still leaning, fractured, in some semblance of being closed, so she supposes no-one has tried to come in at all.

 

She opens the closet, absently looking for something of Monica’s to keep with her as a source of comfort and good luck charm, the way Monica had done when Carol had disappeared so many years ago.

 

Carol brushes her fingers across Monica’s favorite jacket, but moves to the cubbies instead. A shirt is something she could wear under her flight suit without as much fear of damaging it.

 

She makes a note to move Monica’s things to their house at some point, and make sure the neighbors know she's alive and intending to keep her property.

 

Her pager beeps again. It looks like the signal is still broadcasting; at least Fury had made it out alright. She’ll see him eventually; the situation is the same _everywhere_ , so whatever personal crisis he thinks he is alerting her to is no more urgent here than anywhere else.

 

\---

 

It takes her a couple weeks to shake herself enough out of the depressive haze she finds herself in to go see Fury. Monica had not stopped by. She likely never would.

 

She’d moved Monica’s things to their house, charged Maria’s cellphone, looked through the photos in her wife's phone’s gallery, looked through the photos in their house, tried to imagine if this was how Maria felt when her plane went down. At least Maria had Monica then. At least they’d only been together for five years, not thirty-five.

 

Carol takes one last shower, forgoing a towel to evaporate the water from her skin, and puts on one of Monica’s black tank tops and Maria’s slider shorts before pulling her flight suit over the top.

 

She packs a small bag with a change of clothes and a picture of her family, and leaves to break Fury the news that his cat is probably dead.

 

The pager’s signal leads her to an Avengers base in the middle of nowhere. Her comm light darkens, acknowledging that she’s in the right place.

 

Carol follows the sound of voices down the hall to a familiar crowd of strangers.

  
“Where’s Fury?”

 

\---

 

Carol does a good job staying cool, under the circumstances.

 

Fury is dead; finding out as much after weeks of taking the pager’s ring as a comforting sign of his survival is a particularly painful blow.

 

Another reason she shouldn’t have lingered at home so long soon becomes apparent- she’d assumed wrong. Fury’s message _wasn’t_ the same as all the other distress calls she’d picked up on her way back, because these people actually knew what had happened. Earth wasn’t one of the many victims of a widespread tragedy, it was the _epicenter._

 

She listens numbly as they describe a tyrant coming to Earth and unleashing death on the universe. She’d heard of Thanos; she could have killed him years ago if she’d balanced her priorities better. She could have killed him weeks ago if she was visiting her family when he invaded. Instead, Carol was caught up with a random warlord, trying to save hundreds of thousands of lives as... trillions... quadrillions... innumerable numbers of lives were lost instead. She takes careful breaths, tucking her red-hot hands behind her back and nodding along to a question that certainly wasn’t yes-or-no.

 

“I asked who you were,” Natasha Romanoff repeats.

 

“Oh,” Carol replies, voice rough to her ears, “Captain Carol Danvers.”

 

“That’s nice,” James Rhodes says, “ _who are you?_ ”

 

Carol stares blankly at him; she hopes it comes off as more intimidating than traumatized.

 

“You said this stuff was happening off planet too,” Steve Rogers says- had she? - “does that mean you have a ship?”

 

“You need a ship?”

 

Steve nods, “My teammates are still out there, they never returned.”

 

Carol vaguely remembers him mentioning Iron Man going to space between the parts of the story that brought her overwhelming guilt. She brings her arm up, sets her scanner to lock on the coordinates they provided via the ship's tracker.

 

Glad for a task to accomplish, Carol walks out, leaving behind assurances that she’ll bring their teammates back soon. Steve Rogers follows her out.

 

“I’m coming, too,” he says, looking around for her ship.

 

“Good luck with that,” Carol tells him, before launching herself into space.

 

\---

 

\---

 

Carol throws herself into saving people after they kill Thanos.

 

Their easy victory had only strengthened her belief that she could have killed him years ago if she had thought to try.

 

Half the people she’d saved over the past 25 years were dead, and she could have prevented it. She failed to save her family, and all the time she spent away from them over the years was now only half as justified.

 

Before, Carol tried to spend as close to 50% of days on Earth as she could manage- though it probably ended up being only a quarter of her time in some of her busier periods- but now she had no limitations. She could spend as much time saving others as her body and mind would let her.

 

No longer did she have to balance the responsibility of helping people with the desire to see Monica, to sleep next to Maria. They came to her mind just as often, but the yearning no longer had an easy fix back home, only an endless hunger eating her from the inside, like the black holes consuming entire star systems, like her powers’ pull on the energy she absorbed.

 

She hopes they’d be proud of her.

 

\---

 

Maria told her how to deal with this.

 

They’d talked about Carol’s death a lot when she began to settle back into their lives.

 

Carol recalls one night in bed, Maria’s head on her chest as finally gets to speak about her grief, 6 years too late.

 

Maria had felt silly, crying over Carol while Carol stroked her back and pressed kisses to the top of her head, but she told her how it felt to lose her, how it felt to live without her, how she’d learned to get better without anyone to tell her how.

 

Monica helped. (Carol didn’t have Monica. Carol didn’t have Monica and Carol didn’t have Maria to help her with not having Monica.)

 

Having something to do when it got bad was good, like blasting music and fixing airplanes. (Carol copes by fighting.)

 

Maria moved close to her parents, befriended the neighbors, tried to make friends at Monica’s school. (Carol, the first Avenger, reclaimed the title and joined the team; Fury would have wanted to see that.)

 

Maria decided that she and Carol may not have worked out in the long run. It was cruel to herself, to imagine that they would have been together forever, when she knew they would never be together again. (Carol already knows Maria is the love of her life, proven with 35 happy years- 29 if she deducts Vers time. She tries to think how lucky she was to have 3 decades, tries not to think that she had another 3 decades left.)

 

\---

\---

 

She is in the middle of a small town on a small planet, drinking the closest thing they’ve got to coffee while she plans which planets to hit next in her route, when the sparsely populated cafe suddenly grows a lot fuller.

 

As the dust around them swirls into the confused shapes of people, Carol has no doubt what has happened. Her heart drops into her stomach; it feels painful and scary but this time, it's good.

  
She isn’t certain it was her team who had done it- and if it was she had some words about them not giving her a call- but if everyone who had disappeared in the Snap was _back_ , then she is Earth-bound anyway.

 

Carol shoots out of that cafe faster than she’d moved in her life.

 

Too fast for her comms to pick up on Maria’s calls.

 

\---

 

Thanos is alive.

 

All she has to do is keep him from getting the gauntlet and snapping their universe into oblivion, and she can see her family again. This time, she has the opportunity to protect them.

 

She can re-save all those lives she’d saved before, and a trillion... quadrillion... innumerable number more. That would justify a long break, she thinks.

 

When she gets home, she wants to do all the things the black hole in her chest had been demanding. Kiss Maria; stargaze with Monica; sit on the couch with her girls on either side and watch TV; fix planes in the yard with loud music; make dinner with Monica sitting on the counter; lay in bed with her head on Maria’s chest and tell her how she lived without them for the past 5 years.

 

Carol spares a smile and a kind greeting for the boy curled around the Infinity Stones. He’s looking up at her with wonder in his eyes... which, fair, it was pretty bad-ass when she took down that big ship in 20 seconds. Carol had never been a humble woman to begin with; the fact that she was objectively very powerful had not improved the situation at all.

 

Carol takes the Gauntlet from the boy. The feeling coursing through her body, washing over her in time with the waves of fiery light, reminds her of test flights- she is giddy and scared all at once. There's a lot at stake, but so much to gain.

 

She just has to make her shot count.

 

The first time she blacks out in the fight, Thanos gets the Infinity Stones.

 

When she opens her eyes, there isn’t time to feel pain, or fear, or to think. She had dropped the glove somehow, and they were all going to die.

 

Before she's aware of what she's doing, Carol is upon Thanos, trading several blows with him before wrenching his arm down, trying to get the glove off. Only as she struggles with him, hands wrapped firmly around his thick fingers, does it settle on her that she is the only thing between Thanos and everyone else.

 

Thanos tries to pull away, but he has nothing on her. Carol is not only the most powerful person in the universe- if you were to ask her- but his motivations are not strong enough to win. Thanos fights to force his personal philosophy on existence, to be a god, to not die. Carol fights to save her daughter; to see her wife again; to protect others; to kill this man for wronging her personally.

 

If the Avengers had called her when they were gathering the Stones, if she had gotten a chance to fight Thanos before he had the Stones in his possession once more, Carol is sure she could have won.

 

As it is, she has no room to let him go long enough to actually fight him. The simpleness of the action he has to perform to kill them all- snapping- is almost laughable. Carol focuses all of her energy, all the power the black hole in her chest had gathered over 5 years, into gaining the upper hand.

 

She gets it, for about a second.

 

Carol thinks she may be the most powerful person in the universe, but even gods fell to the Infinity Stones.

 

The second time Carol blacks out in the fight, Tony Stark dies.

 

\---

 

When Carol wakes, they’ve already won.

 

Okoye is crouched over her, pressing two fingers firmly to her neck to read her pulse. Her head is turned, towards the Black Panther. Okoye’s lips are moving, but all Carol can hear is a distant swishing noise.

 

The part of her brain which registers sound has stopped working, and the part which allows her to think conscious, intelligent thought seems to have left her as well. All that she's aware of is a pervasive feeling of relief- apparently her muddled mind is still able to observe that no-one is fighting- followed by a fair amount of pain as the adrenaline leaves her and her body sags more limply into the dirt.

 

Carol is no longer glowing. In stark contrast to the radiant, powerful figure who had left an impression on every single person on the battlefield less than an hour before, she is now dull, dusty, bloody, and incapable of sitting up without help. She tries, a couple times, and Okoye watches her silently as she twitches on the ground, eyes rolling back in her head.

 

Blue, distinctly alien blood covers half of her face and plasters her short hair to her temple from a large cut across the top of her forehead and into her hairline. Her eyes have already started to darken from her broken nose, and more blue blood covers her lips.

 

More worrying to Okoye are the quick, shallow movements of Carol's chest, and the occasional wheeze Okoye hears as Carol shifts around on the dusty ground. She’d fractured her sternum, Okoye notes, as well as some ribs.

 

Peter comes over after several more minutes, stepping away from one dead Avenger, and judging by the look on his face, expecting to see another.

  
“She’s alive,” Okoye says.

 

She can hear again, Carol determines.

  
Thank God, too, because the next sound is her comm.

 

The only problem is that she can’t lift her opposite arm over her chest to answer.

 

“Get it,” Carol begs, to Okoye, to Peter, whoever, “get it; get it; get it.”

 

Peter jumps to action, leaning over Carol to push the glowing spot on her forearm, hoping for the best.

 

“Carol?” Maria answers.

 

Carol wants answer; she tries to laugh; she wheezes.

 

“Carol?”

 

Peter looks like he wants to assure the woman on the other end that Carol's fine, but also that he's not so sure it's true.

 

"Hi," she manages, teeth bared in a genuine, wide smile.

 

She can't lift her head yet, but Okoye holds Carol's arm so it's closer to her mouth. It still hurts, but she's hardly aware of anything but joy.

 

Maria's frantic voice on the other end, asking Carol if she's alright, is the most beautiful sound in the world.

 

\---

 

Carol lands in the backyard at 4am the next day.

 

Thor was kind enough to strike her with lightning once she proved she was able to stand, supplying her with enough energy to move around on her own again.

 

Carol heals fast; she’s sure after a few days of rest and sunbathing, the superficial damage will fade and the fractures in her chest will begin to knit themselves back together.

 

She doesn't have time to knock before the door is wrenched open and the wind is knocked out of her. Broken ribs aside, the feeling of Monica in her arms has taken her breath away.

 

Carol rests her head on top the shorter woman's, cheek pressed to the silky headband she's used to pull her dreads away from her face. Silent tears drip from her eyes onto the smooth material, beading on top before soaking into the fabric.

 

Monica's wearing her plaid pajamas- one of the many sets Carol packed away numbly 5 years ago and left in their computer room- but she obviously hasn't been asleep.

 

"Hey Lieutenant," Carol greets, relieved as Monica removes the painful pressure from around her torso.

 

It's kind of Monica to look as emotional as Carol feels- distinctly unlike how Carol had acted towards them both when she blew back into their lives as Vers.

 

For Monica, it's only been a month since they've seen each other last, but for Carol, it's been 5 years of thinking she'd lost them forever. Monica has always been empathetic, so despite the difference in their experiences, she cries right along with Carol as they linger on the porch.

 

Carol wipes the tears from her face, thumbs skirting the two black eyes from her broken nose, and gently moves past Monica into the house.

 

Goose sits on the bottom step, delicately licking a paw.

 

Carol brushes her fingers over Goose’s ear as she moves past her on the stairs, feels the Flerken’s tail gently flick against her ankles in greeting.

 

Their bedroom is lit when she walks in. Maria is laying on top of the covers, still dressed, asleep.

 

Her phone is held loosely in her hand, like she had been watching it until hours of waiting pushed her unintentionally to sleep.

 

She's still the most beautiful person Carol's ever seen. It's one thing to see her face in the pictures Carol had loaded into her computer, but she's a whole other level of stunning in person.

 

Maria's eyes are open by the time Carol crouches beside the bed. She's still crying, hasn't really stopped since she landed, and a sob comes out in place of the smooth greeting she'd prepared.

 

Maria drops down onto the floor with her, putting her back into the corner between the bed and the nightstand, and gently pulls Carol into her lap.

 

Monica hovers by the door for a moment longer before walking down to put on the kettle for when her parents eventually come downstairs.

 

"Fuck," Carol mumbles, regaining her composure now that she's back in Maria's comforting arms, "you handled this scenario much better."

 

"I was having too much trouble processing it," Maria said, "what with the aliens and all."

 

Carol sits up, wipes her face, feels truly calm for the first time in a while. Maria smiles softly at her, tracing lines over her back.

 

Just as it did when her memories began to return- inhibited no longer by periodic visits to the Supreme Intelligence- being home feels very suddenly normal.

 

Living without her family was her everyday experience for the past 5 years, but it never felt real; having them back, it's like nothing has changed.

 

Maria strokes a line up Carol’s back before curling her fingers into her close-cropped hair.

 

"This cut is cute," she purrs, “dare-I-say better than when you got  a mohawk in your 40s.”

 

Almost nothing.  

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is meant to be best scenario. 
> 
> Carol protecting space doesn't mean she can't live on Earth, it just means she is gone often enough that major events sometimes pass her by.  
> Ideally, both Monica & Maria poofed for a bit and came back; this way neither of them dealt with heartache and neither were alone and aging 5 more years while Carol was ridiculously busy in space. Snap hits pause on them, Carol angsts for a few years, gets her family back after. 
> 
> Also Monica deserves to be a superhero and if she was alive in Endgame she either is 40+ when she gets her powers (not the worst, but I'd like her to have them longer) or she is already a superhero and yet not relevant in Endgame for some reason.


End file.
